Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Today in gossip - song writers won't get royalties; Deepika skanks it up for Maxim; the Western press has fun with Gandhi to Hitler; and MORE!

* There will be no relief for song writers in the ongoing Bollywood copyright saga.

The Indian film music industry has traditionally worked on a “work-for-hire” basis where film producers and banners buy all rights from composers, lyricists and performers for a one-off fee. Music rights are then sold by producers to record companies for whom PPL is the representing collecting agency leaving IPRS with little to administer outside of typical film deals. Since it has recpirocal agreements with international collecting agencies, IPRS also collects royalties for international repertoire in India.

The “work-for-hire” culture was further cemented with a 1977 Supreme Court judgment which held that the ownership of all underlying works that were incorporated into a movie vested with the film producer (the commissioner of the work), unless a contract provided otherwise.

* Conservative rag the Washington Times joins the people making fun of Gandhi to Hitler. I WANT TO SEE THIS FILM!

Musical numbers. The Himalayas as European scenery. A pint-size Indian actor starring as a Hitler dwarfed by his Nazi minions, played by dark-skinned Indian actors standing in for the pale, towheaded Aryan stock idealized by the Third Reich.

These are just some of the unlikely components combined in “Dear Friend Hitler,” which opened across India on Friday.

To be fair, are dark Aryans any more ridiculous than the white Arabs and blond Romans and Greeks that we Americans see in Hollywood films?

* This is kind of funny - the local newspaper writer who did the story on Ranjeeta discovers the murky world of the copy-paste Bollywood gossip media.

I was online when I found them, after doing a routine Google search. The words had been carefully strung together earlier this year in a lengthy story I had authored about a local woman named Ranjeeta Masand. Now, they sounded clunky and nonsensical, and the misspellings were atrocious:

“Ranjeeta Masand, who is improved famous by her lass name, Ranjeeta Kaur, is famous to many people in India simply as Ranjeeta. She was a Bollywood singer in a 1970s and 1980s.”

Simply put, this is laughable. Yes, we at Bollywood are fascinated by the number game and yes, till about a couple of years back there was just one man who ruled from the top - Shah Rukh Khan. Of course Aamir Khan's continued good run and Salman Khan's resurgence has meant there is added competition as well. But to suggest that Shah Rukh has slipped from his position and others have 'overtaken' him would be too hasty a statement to be made. And that's because the man hasn't - read it carefully - delivered a flop for ages now.

"I took the break because I really needed to look at the things from an outsider's perspective. As an actor, it helped me a lot."

Her love for acting inspired her to make a come-back, she said.

"For me, it's really about the craft and I enjoy it thoroughly. So, if I don't sign anything that genuinely excites me, I lose interest right there. I was fortunate that Nagesh came to me with Mod," said Ayesha, who made her debut as an actress with Taarzan: The Wonder Car in 2004.